Lower Paleolithic Bone Tools From Pleistocene Quaternary Schöningen, Germany

Lower Paleolithic bone tools from the ‘Spear Horizon’ at Schöningen (Germany)

Authors:

van Kolfschoten et al

Abstract:

The Lower Paleolithic locality of Schöningen 13 II-4 is famous for the discovery of wooden spears found amongst the butchered remains of numerous horses and other large herbivores. Although the spears have attracted the most interest, other aspects of the associated artifact assemblage have received less attention. Here we describe an extraordinary assemblage of 88 bone tools from the ‘Spear Horizon.’ This sample includes numerous long bone shaft fragments (mostly of horse), three ribs used as ‘retouchers’ to resharpen flint tools, and a complete horse innominate that was used as an anvil in bipolar knapping. Most of the retouchers were prepared by scraping the diaphysis of fresh and dry long bones. Technological analysis of the associated lithic assemblage demonstrates exhaustive resharpening to maintain functional cutting edges. Whereas the flint tools were brought to the site, curated, and maintained, the retouchers had a shorter use-history and were either discarded after a limited period or broken to extract marrow.

Horse and bison metapodials with flaked and rounded epiphyses are interpreted as hammers used to break marrow bones. Several of the ‘metapodial hammers’ were additionally used as knapping percussors. These constitute the earliest evidence of multi-purpose bone tools in the archeological record. Our results highlight the advanced knowledge in the use of bones as tools during the Lower Paleolithic, with major implications for understanding aspects of non-lithic technology and planning depth in early hominins.

Waiting for the Bubble to Pop: Uber Valued at $62.5 Billion

Uber Technologies is looking to raise as much as $2.1 billion in a financing round that would value the car-booking company at $62.5 billion, said people familiar with the matter. Uber has filed paperwork in Delaware detailing the fundraising plans, said the people, who asked not to be named because the plans are private.

The new funding shows Uber is accelerating its race to expand globally and branch into services beyond picking up and dropping off riders. The company has tested food and package delivery in some cities, and is working on new technology, such as self-driving cars. Uber is spending aggressively to expand throughout Asia, particularly in China, where the company expects to spend $1 billion, according to a June letter to investors from Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick.

link.

China Imposes ITAR-like Export Controls on Drones, Supercomputers

China will impose export control on some drones and high performance computers startingon August 15th, according to an announcement published on Friday by China's Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs.

Companies need to apply for permits from related commerce department under the StateCouncil to export some drones and other commodities listed, the announcement added.

link.

Introducing the Shipping Container Gardens From Freight Farms and Cropbox

Ensuring that the food we eat is locally and sustainably grown is not always easy, especially in cities where crop-growing space is at a premium. Firms like Freight Farms and Cropbox, however, have a solution to this problem. They offer shipping containers that are kitted out as self-contained farms.

We've already seen the humble shipping container reappropriated for all sorts of different uses, including as part of an inner city farm concept. Freight Farms and Cropbox actually deliver that concept, albeit more practically and one container at a time.

The containers offered by both companies feature hydroponic technology, which employs a mineral-based solution in which to grow crops rather than soil. This means that the quality of the produce is not affected by prevailing weather conditions and that the conditions can be precisely tailored.

According to Cropbox, such systems use up to 90 percent less water than traditional growing methods. Both firms offer LED lighting in their containers too, which also compares favorably to other lighting methods. Overall, Freight Farms says each one of its containers takes 30,000 kWh of electricity annually to run.

link.

Despite Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator Loss, Karem & AVX Aircraft may Still get US Army Funding

The US Army could fund development of rotorcraft technology offered by two companies not selected to build demonstrator aircraft under the Pentagon's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) programme, officials announced on 3 October.

The army selected a Sikorsky-Boeing team and Bell Helicopter in August to build rotorcraft for JMR-TD with partial government funding,

However, in a 3 October statement, the Army said AVX Aircraft Company and Karem Aircraft Inc, two smaller companies, "also offer technologies and configurations of interest", adding it would "seek to continue technology development efforts with those teams based on resources and opportunities".

link.

Additive Manufacturing Revolution Update

Stratasys has a multicolor 3D printer allowing many hues and many colored pieces without assembly.

News from CES has XYZprinting's $499 3D printer and a nifty 3Doodler which allows you to sketch what you want and go straight to printing.

Dell is starting to resell MakerBot 3d Printers.

SOLS raises $1.75 million for 3d printing insoles for shoes: ones customized to your own foot.

DMG Mori has an impressive metal printer attached to a 5 axis head which uses a 2 kilowatt diode laser.

British Aerospace flies a Tornado fighter-bomber with 3d printed parts.

A Forbes article claims Taiwan government's heavy backing of 3d printing startups will bring it dominance.

Business Insider has an article on 3d printing as well, headlining with Victoria Secret's wings at the fashion show were 3d printed.  It also argues 3d printing will produce transition from a macro-manufactured supply chain to a micro-manufactured supply chain and argues a possibility for the future of programmable matter under the name of 4d printing.

Toyota Squares off Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car Against Tesla's Eletric Cars

In an escalation of the auto industry's war of words over future green technologies, a senior Toyota Motor Corp executive singled out Elon Musk and other rival executives on Tuesday and made a bold prediction for its hydrogen car.

Bob Carter, Toyota's senior vice president for automative operations, said in a speech that he believed a hydrogen fuel cell car it plans to launch next year could eventually be as successful as its pioneering Prius gasoline-electric hybrid.

Carter said "naysayers" who have spoken out against the technology would be proven wrong and referred to Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc, Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan Motor Co, and former Volkswagen executive Jonathan Browning by name.

"Personally I don't really care what Elon and Carlos and Jonathan have to say about fuel cells. It's very reminiscent of 1998, 1999 when we first introduced the Prius," Carter said at a conference held in conjunction with the Detroit auto show.

The comments underscore just how big the stakes are in the race to take the lead in the next generation green car.

While Toyota is investing heavily in fuel cells, others such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Tesla are betting on electric vehicles as the next big thing while publically questioning whether hydrogen could ever develop into a practical automotive fuel.

link.

Don't Blame Technology for Wage Inequality

Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality

Authors:

Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and John Schmitt

Executive Summary:

Many economists contend that technology is the primary driver of the increase in wage inequality since the late 1970s, as technology-induced job skill requirements have outpaced the growing education levels of the workforce. The influential “skill-biased technological change” (SBTC) explanation claims that technology raises demand for educated workers, thus allowing them to command higher wages—which in turn increases wage inequality. A more recent SBTC explanation focuses on computerization’s role in increasing employment in both higher-wage and lower-wage occupations, resulting in “job polarization.” This paper contends that current SBTC models—such as the education-focused “canonical model” and the more recent “tasks framework” or “job polarization” approach mentioned above—do not adequately account for key wage patterns (namely, rising wage inequality) over the last three decades. Principal findings include:

1. Technological and skill deficiency explanations of wage inequality have failed to explain key wage patterns over the last three decades, including the 2000s.

The early version of the “skill-biased technological change” (SBTC) explanation of wage inequality posited a race between technology and education where education levels failed to keep up with technology-driven increases in skill requirements, resulting in relatively higher wages for more educated groups, which in turn fueled wage inequality (Katz and Murphy 1992; Autor, Katz, and Krueger 1998; and Goldin and Katz 2010). However, the scholars associated with this early, and still widely discussed, explanation highlight that it has failed to explain wage trends in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly the stability of the 50/10 wage gap (the wage gap between low- and middle-wage earners) and the deceleration of the growth of the college wage premium since the early 1990s (Autor, Katz, and Kearney 2006; Acemoglu and Autor 2012). This motivated a new technology-based explanation (formally called the “tasks framework”) focused on computerization’s impact on occupational employment trends and the resulting “job polarization”: the claim that occupational employment grew relatively strongly at the top and bottom of the wage scale but eroded in the middle (Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003; Autor, Katz, and Kearney 2006; Acemoglu and Autor 2012; Autor 2010). We demonstrate that this newer version—the task framework, or job polarization analysis—fails to explain the key wage patterns in the 1990s it intended to explain, and provides no insights into wage patterns in the 2000s. We conclude that there is no currently available technology-based story that can adequately explain the wage trends of the last three decades.

2. History shows that middle-wage occupations have shrunk and higher-wage occupations have expanded since the 1950s. This has not driven any changed pattern of wage trends.

We demonstrate that key aspects of “job polarization” have been taking place since at least 1950. We label this “occupational upgrading” since it primarily consists of shrinkage in relative employment in middle-wage occupations and a corresponding expansion of employment in higher-wage occupations. Lower-wage occupations have remained a small (less than 15 percent) and relatively stable share of total employment since the 1950s, though they have grown in importance in the 2000s. Occupational upgrading has occurred in decades with both rising and falling wage inequality and in decades with both rising and falling median wages, indicating that occupational employment patterns, by themselves, cannot explain the salient wage trends.

3. Evidence for job polarization is weak.

We use the Current Population Survey to replicate existing findings on job polarization, which are all based on decennial census data. Job polarization is said to exist when there is a U-shaped plot in changes in occupational employment against the initial occupational wage level, indicating employment expansion among high- and low-wage occupations relative to middle-wage occupations. As shown in Figure E (explained later in the paper but introduced here), in important cases, these plots do not take the posited U-shape. More importantly, in all cases the lines traced out fit the data very poorly, obscuring large variations in employment growth across occupational wage levels.

4. There was no occupational job polarization in the 2000s.

In the 2000s, relative employment expanded in lower-wage occupations, but was flat at both the middle and the top of the occupational wage distribution. The lack of overall job polarization in the 2000s is a phenomenon visible in both the analyses of decennial census/American Community Survey data provided by proponents of the tasks framework/job polarization perspective (Autor 2010; Acemoglu and Autor 2012) and in our analysis of the Current Population Survey. Thus, the standard techniques applied to the data for the 2000s do not establish even a prima facie case for the existence of overall job polarization in the most recent decade. This leaves the job polarization story, at best, as an account of wage inequality in the 1990s. It certainly calls into question whether it should be a description of current labor market trends and the basis of current policy decisions.

5. Occupational employment trends do not drive wage patterns or wage inequality.

We demonstrate that the evidence does not support the key causal links between technology-driven changes in tasks and occupational employment patterns and wage inequality that are at the core of the tasks framework and job polarization story. Proponents of job polarization as a determinant of wage polarization have, for the most part, only provided circumstantial evidence: both trends occurred at the same time. The causal story of the tasks framework is that technology (i.e., computerization) drives changes in the demand for tasks (increasing demand at the top and bottom relative to the middle), producing corresponding changes in occupational employment (increasing relative employment in high- and low-wage occupations relative to middle-wage occupations). These changes in occupational employment patterns are said to drive changes in overall wage patterns, raising wages at the top and bottom relative to the middle. However, the intermediate step in this story must be that occupational employment trends change the occupational wage structure, raising relative wages for occupations with expanding employment shares and vice-versa. We demonstrate that there is little or no connection between decadal changes in occupational employment shares and occupational wage growth, and little or no connection between decadal changes in occupational wages and overall wages. Changes within occupations greatly dominate changes across occupations so that the much-focused-on occupational trends, by themselves, provide few insights.

6. Occupations have become less, not more, important determinants of wage patterns.

The tasks framework suggests that differences in returns to occupations are an increasingly important determinant of wage dispersion. Using the CPS, we do not find this to be the case. We find that a large and increasing share of the rise in wage inequality in recent decades (as measured by the increase in the variance of wages) occurred within detailed occupations. Furthermore, using DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux’s reweighting procedure, we do not find that occupations consistently explain a rising share of the change in upper tail and lower tail inequality for either men or women.

7. An expanded demand for low-wage service occupations is not a key driver of wage trends.

We are skeptical of the recent efforts of Autor and Dorn (2013) that ask the low-wage “service occupations” to carry much or all of the weight of the tasks framework. First, the small size and the slow, relatively steady growth of the service occupations suggest significant limitations of a technology-driven expansion of service occupations to be able to explain the large and contradictory changes in wage growth at the bottom of the distribution (i.e., between middle and low wages, the 50/10 wage differential), let alone movements at the middle or higher up the wage distribution. The service occupations remain a relatively small share of total employment; in 2007, they accounted for less than 13 percent of total employment, and just over half of employment in the bottom quintile of occupations ranked by wages. Moreover, these occupations have expanded only modestly in recent decades, increasing their employment share by 2.1 percentage points between 1979 and 2007, with most of the gain in the 2000s. Relative employment in all low-wage occupations, taken together, has been stable for the last three decades, representing a 21.1 percent share of total employment in 1979, 19.7 percent in 1999, and 20.0 percent in 2007.

Second, the expansion of service occupation employment has not driven their wage levels and therefore has not driven overall wage patterns. The timing of the most important changes in employment shares and wage levels in the service occupations is not compatible with conventional interpretations of the tasks framework. Essentially all of the wage growth in the service occupations over the last few decades occurred in the second half of the 1990s, when the employment share in these occupations was flat. The observed wage increases preceded almost all of the total growth in service occupations over the 1979–2007 period, which took place in the 2000s, when service occupation wages were falling (another trend that contradicts the overall claim of the explanatory power of service occupation employment trends).

8. Occupational employment trends provide only limited insights into the main dynamics of the labor market, particularly wage trends.

A more general point can and should be drawn from our findings: Occupational employment trends do not, by themselves, provide much of a read into key labor market trends because changes within occupations are dominant. Recent research and journalistic treatment of the labor market has highlighted the pattern of occupational employment growth to assess the extent of structural unemployment, the disproportionate increase in low-wage jobs, and the “coming of robots”—changes in workplace technology and the consequent impact on wage inequality. The recent academic literature on wage inequality has highlighted the role of changes in the occupational distribution of employment as the key factor. In particular, occupational employment trends have become increasingly used as indicators of job skill requirement changes, reflecting the outcome of changes in the nature of jobs and the way we produce goods and services. Our findings indicate, however, that occupational employment trends give only limited insight and leave little imprint on the evolution of the occupational wage structure, and certainly do not drive changes in the overall wage structure. We therefore urge extreme caution in drawing strong conclusions about overall labor market trends based on occupational employment trends by themselves.

InfinitEye Prototype VR Display: a Road to VR Review

InfinitEye is a prototype head mounted display that uses dual 1280×800 displays to create a massive 210 degree field of view. I traveled to Toulouse, France to be the first journalist in the world to go hands-on with the unit. These are my thoughts on the trip, the team, and the HMD itself.

link.

The Disk Drive Which Can Save Data for One Million Years

Back in 1956, IBM introduced the world’s first commercial computer capable of storing data on a magnetic disk drive. The IBM 305 RAMAC used fifty 24-inch discs to store up to 5 MB, an impressive feat in those days. Today, however, it’s not difficult to find hard drives that can store 1 TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk.

But despite this huge increase in storage density and a similarly impressive improvement in power efficiency, one thing hasn’t changed. The lifetime over which data can be stored on magnetic discs is still about a decade.

That raises an interesting problem. How are we to preserve information about our civilisation on a timescale that outlasts it? In other words, what technology can reliably store information for 1 million years or more?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Jeroen de Vries at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and a few pals. These guys have designed and built a disk capable of storing data over this timescale. And they’ve performed accelerated ageing tests which show it should be able to store data for 1 million years and possibly longer.

These guys start with some theory about ageing. Clearly, it’s impractical to conduct an ageing experiment in real time, particularly when the periods involved are measured in millions of years. But there is a way to accelerate the process of ageing.

This is based on the idea that data must be stored in an energy minimum that is separated from other minima by an energy barrier. So to corrupt data by converting a 0 to a 1, for example, requires enough energy to overcome this barrier.

The probability that the system will jump in this way is governed by an idea known as Arrhenius law. This relates the probability of jumping the barrier to factors such as its temperature, the Boltzmann constant and how often a jump can be attempted, which is related to the level of atomic vibrations.

Some straightforward calculations reveal that to last a million years, the required energy barrier is 63 KBT or 70 KBT to last a billion years. “These values are well within the range of today’s technology,” say de Vries and co.

And to prove the point, they go ahead and build a disk capable of storing information for this period of time. The disk is simple in conception. The data is stored in the pattern of lines etched into a thin metal disc and then covered with a protective layer.

The metal in question is tungsten, which they chose because of its high melting temperature (3,422 degrees C) and low thermal expansion coefficient. The protective layer is silicon nitride (Si3N4) chosen because of its high resistance to fracture and its low thermal expansion coefficient.

These guys made their disc using standard patterning techniques and stored data in the form of QR codes with lines 100nm wide. They then heated the disks at various temperatures to see how the data fared.

The results are impressive. According to Arrhenius law, a disk capable of surviving a million years would have to survive 1 hour at 445 Kelvin, a test that the new disks passed with ease. Indeed, they survived temperatures up to 848 Kelvin, albeit with significant amounts of information loss.

link.

What Has Happened to Our Ability to Tackle Problems With Technology?

New Electric Car Sex Appeal is...Performance

Already noted for saving gasoline and having zero emissions, electric cars have quietly taken on an unlikely new dimension –– the ability to reach blazing speeds that rival the 0-to-60 performance of a typical Porsche or BMW, and compete on some racecourses with the world's best gasoline-powered cars, an authority said here today at a major scientific conference.

Speaking at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, electric vehicle pioneer John E. Waters said that relatively recent advances in engineering and use of lithium-ion batteries are producing electric vehicles (EVs) capable of leaving traditional internal combustion engine race cars in the dust.

"Experimental electric cars already have achieved sustained speeds of more than 180 miles per hour, and established world speed records above 300 mph," Waters said. "Electric cars have inherent advantages in efficiency and torque over gasoline-powered vehicles. Energy storage-to-torque on an EV platform is above 90 percent efficient, compared to less than 35 percent for internal combustion engines. I have no doubt that battery-powered race cars will be attracting race fans in the immediate future."

 link.

umm.  At least for motorcycles, he's a day late and a dollar short.

New Patent Search Tool Creates Interesting Technology Interdepedence Map

Luciano Kay at the University of California Santa Barbara and a few pals reveal a new search tool that exploits the structure of links between patents to study the connection between technologies.

In their new approach, Kay and co create a network in which each patent is a node. They assign a link between two nodes if one patent cites another and define the “technological distance” between two areas of the resulting map as the strength of the links between them. So areas of this network are distant if they have few links but close if they have many links.

To test out this approach, Kay and pals have applied it to the entire corpus of patent data from 2000 to 2006 in the European Patent Office. They have also created a tool for visualising and interrogating the map that is available here. (However, at the time of writing, it did not work due to some bugs.)

The resulting patent maps provide a fascinating insight into the structure of the technological landscape and the role of various players within it.

link.

NY Times OpEd: Is Technology Ruining the Middle Class?

In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.

This job drought has spurred pundits to wonder whether a profound employment sickness has overtaken us. And from there, it’s only a short leap to ask whether that illness isn’t productivity itself. Have we mechanized and computerized ourselves into obsolescence?

Are we in danger of losing the “race against the machine,” as the M.I.T. scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in a recent book? Are we becoming enslaved to our “robot overlords,” as the journalist Kevin Drum warned in Mother Jones? Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year? Have we reached “the end of labor,” as Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?

Of course, anxiety, and even hysteria, about the adverse effects of technological change on employment have a venerable history. In the early 19th century a group of English textile artisans calling themselves the Luddites staged a machine-trashing rebellion. Their brashness earned them a place (rarely positive) in the lexicon, but they had legitimate reasons for concern.

Economists have historically rejected what we call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false. In 1900, for example, 41 percent of the United States work force was in agriculture. By 2000, that share had fallen to 2 percent, after the Green Revolution transformed crop yields. But the employment-to-population ratio rose over the 20th century as women moved from home to market, and the unemployment rate fluctuated cyclically, with no long-term increase.

Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor. In 1900, no one could foresee that a century later, health care, finance, information technology, consumer electronics, hospitality, leisure and entertainment would employ far more workers than agriculture. Of course, as societies grow more prosperous, citizens often choose to work shorter days, take longer vacations and retire earlier — but that too is progress.

So if technological advances don’t threaten employment, does that mean workers have nothing to fear from “smart machines”? Actually, no — and here’s where the Luddites had a point. Although many 19th-century Britons benefited from the introduction of newer and better automated looms — unskilled laborers were hired as loom operators, and a growing middle class could now afford mass-produced fabrics — it’s unlikely that skilled textile workers benefited on the whole.

Fast-forward to the present. The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor. These rapid advances — which confront us daily as we check in at airports, order books online, pay bills on our banks’ Web sites or consult our smartphones for driving directions — have reawakened fears that workers will be displaced by machinery. Will this time be different?

Go read.  The New Artisans is a concept which needs to be expanded on.  I'll do that as my Fifth Crazy Thought, I think.  However, I need to return to the Fourth Crazy Thought (I made a booboo and I'll do my mea culpa and I have been communicating with the principle investigator on a project which ran a simulation of a very large neural net recently on Riken).

The Future is Here: Controlling Machines With Thought

Emotiv Lifesciences, the company Le co-founded, produces portable, high-resolution EEG (electroencephalogram) brain-scanning headsets that Le hopes will open new windows on the complex functioning of our brain. On August 1, Emotiv unveiled Emotiv Insight, a faster, next-generation wireless brain scanner that collects real-time data on the wearer's thoughts and feelings and delivers it directly to a computer, phone, or other device through Android, iOS, OSX, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Le hopes the product, which costs $199, can further democratize brain research and help scientists gather more data. Using the EEG headsets, she says, people around the world can study brains under conditions and stimuli as varied as those we encounter in everyday life—because subjects can wear the headset while doing everyday tasks.

[...]

Here are four applications of the portable brain scanners that Le says are already beginning to take shape:

1. Moving Things With the Mind

The EEG headset has helped paralyzed patients control an electric wheelchair and make music via computer using only the power of their minds, said Le.

[...]

2. Diagnosing Disease

Le stresses that because we lack a large, easily accessible database of "normal" brain data, we're likely missing opportunities to identify and track the causes of brain ailments from their earliest stages—when intervention might be less dramatic and more successful.

[...]

3. Making Learning Easier

With EEG technology becoming more affordable, scientists and citizens alike can get a more complete picture of how each individual brain operates in real-world situations, ranging from social interactions to studying to intense physical activity, said Le.

[...]

4. Organizing Data by Thoughts and Emotions

Le suggests that brain-scan information could one day be used to help people organize the avalanche of data, videos, images, audio, and other media that is steadily mounting.

My bet.  Computers will be something like this attached to Google Glass (or a competitor) and something the size of a cell phone which you will wear.  This will be tied into the cloud where your data will be stored and there will be a wireless graphics channel for when you want to talk to large screens, something like Bluetooth but on steroids and have a wireless connection to your cell phone company of choice.  

3D Printing Causing a Collision of Copyright And Use

The world of 3D printing designers was set abuzz recently, when popular designer Asher Nahmias pulled his work from a well-known online store in protest after Stratasys, one of the biggest 3D printer manufacturers, improperly used one of his designs.

The incident – not the first and surely not the last – represented a curious reversal of sorts. Often, discussions about copyright or patent infringement related to 3D printing revolve around the idea of individuals stealing designs from corporations.

In this scenario, it was the reverse, highlighting just how much confusion there is around rights in 3D printing and how much work needs to be done to figure out how best to protect against improper use.

"With all the things this technology is capable of delivering in terms of improving designs and enhancing sustainability and delivering better personalized medical treatment, there are also a lot of unintended consequences," said Avi Reichental, president and CEO of 3D Systems, a 3D printer maker that itself has also been accused of improperly using Nahmias' designs. "Piracy and patent infringement and copyright infringement are going to be part and parcel of the unintended consequences powered by the same technology that can do so much good."